The Silly Blue-bag Mystery

December 07, 1995

Here's a complimentary public-relations tip for Chicago officials, especially those coordinating the city's new residential recycling program: The surest way to get bad publicity is to act like you're trying to hide from bad publicity.

Monday was opening day of the blue-bag recycling initiative--launched after five years of preparation and an impressive $3.5 million educational and advertising blitz to get it off to a good start. Some 750,000 residents of single-family homes and small apartment buildings were asked to put their recyclables into blue plastic bags and set them out with their regular garbage for hauling to the nerve centers of the operation--four newly constructed sorting centers where the blue bags would be separated and slit to launch the recyclables into productive new uses.

There was a lot of legitimate interest in this from inquiring reporters, participating residents and suburban recycling operations--as well as skeptics convinced that the program would flop.

So how did it go? Only the city knows. The sorting centers--where the early success of the program could best be measured--became restricted zones, closed to the media and public alike. Attention from onlookers, it seems, would put too much pressure on workers and become a distraction.

It also could seem that the city, sensitive to ongoing criticism of the program, feared something would go wrong and tried to keep the lid on in the hope that no news might turn out to be good news--the official city version that everything went fine. And maybe it did.

But if that was the strategy, it surely backfired, as any public-relations novice could have predicted. What were all the stories about the next day? Not how the program got off to a good start or a checkered start with improvements to come. Not about recycling at all, but about how the city was curiously secretive, orchestrating a mystery in the sorting centers.

And all that accomplished was to toss fresh meat to the program's critics, who have been predicting failure for a variety of reasons--among them a lack of interest and the risk that blue bags would be shredded or crushed in the garbage trucks, ruining or contaminating the recyclables. Now they were practically invited to ask: What does the city have to hide?

As government secrecy goes, this is not a big deal. But it certainly is no way to build faith in a program that desperately needs trust and participation if it is to succeed. That means being open and honest, celebrating what works and fixing what doesn't.